Spotlight on YogaX:
Pathways for Bringing Therapeutic Yoga Into Healthcare

YogaX, informed by decades of therapeutic yoga work by Dr. Christiane Brems, is a Special Initiative of the Chair that is designed to integrate therapeutic yoga into healthcare. This groundbreaking endeavor equips healthcare providers and yoga professionals with comprehensive skill sets and toolkits that encompass integrated holistic yoga practices, empowering people on their journey toward healing, resilience, and thriving. Integration of yoga into healthcare settings also presents an innovative and multifaceted opportunity to revolutionize at least some of the challenges within current healthcare systems. Read more about the reasons for bringing yoga into healthcare.

Due to increasing awareness of yoga’s therapeutic effects, the demand for incorporating yoga strategies and psychology into clinical healthcare settings has never been greater. To address this need, the International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT) and YogaX collaborated to create an educational opportunity specifically tailored to Qualified Healthcare Professionals (QHPs). This IAYT-accredited pathway allows healthcare professionals to earn an IAYT-Q credential that certifies that they have gained the therapeutic yoga skills necessary to bring yoga strategies into their extant healthcare practice.

Read more about the IAYT-Q program and about the spectrum of yoga services. 

Innovation through Integration

YogaX’s 300-hour therapeutic yoga program for healthcare professionals became the first therapeutic yoga program in the nation to offer this unique IAYT-accredited pathway for providers who seek to integrate therapeutic yoga in their extant scope of practice. The YogaX "Integrated Holistic Yoga Therapeutics in Healthcare" program is a flexible hybrid program (partially in-person; partially synchronously online to optimize access for busy healthcare professionals) that emphasizes the fusion of yoga's ancient wisdom with modern science. The program is unique in many ways:

• YogaX has paved the way for an integration of therapeutic principles in healthcare settings that prioritizes interventions with the whole person
• YogaX courses are taught by highly credentialed care providers with dual training in a healthcare discipline and in therapeutic yoga.
• YogaX programs emphasize the application of therapeutic yoga as an extensive and varied set of primary, secondary, and, tertiary prevention strategies with profound implications for lifestyle, relational wellbeing, and collective health and resilience.
• The YogaX IAYT-Q program is specifically tailored to help trainees develop holistic and integrated conceptual understandings and therapeutic yoga skills (in line with IAYT’s standards) that are transformative, encourage inquiry, and promote health, resilience, and thriving.
   

YogaX is uniquely Stanford. Its programs are innovative and nationally recognized for their excellence and integration of science. The YogaX IAYT-Q program, in particular, reflects cutting-edge thinking and leadership in the emergence of a new paradigm about how therapeutic yoga can be applied in healthcare settings. Our therapeutic principles and strategies are life-changing for trainees, healthcare providers, and their patients or clients. They have the potential to transform how healthcare is delivered with a strong focus on creating lifestyle changes that reverberate into body, mind, heart, and spirit.

Opportunities

YogaX is now accepting applications for the YogaX 200HR Virtual YTT 2025 Cohort

We are thrilled to extend a warm invitation to you. 

In our ongoing efforts to advance our mission of training yoga professionals to integrate therapeutic yoga into healthcare and community health settings, we cordially invite you to apply for the 2025 200-hour YogaX Cohort.

The Yoga Teacher Training begins on January 18, 2025.

If you have any questions about the program or the application, please contact the program manager Geno Carvalho, at genotype@stanford.edu.

If you are interested in participating in YogaX training programs, taking YogaX classes, or accessing our many free resources, please visit the YogaX webpage.  We are currently accepting applications to all YogaX training programs. Click this link to a comprehensive overview of all YogaX training programs and access all YogaX program applications here.  Our next advanced yoga therapeutics training module starts in November, is entitled Trauma-Informed Yoga: Conceptualization and Application and is led by Dr. Lauren Justice.